‘We have given up so much’: Passion and denial in the Dutch Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) controversy

Methodology

Facebook continues to play a central role in the rallying of supporters on both sides, most crucially when it served to galvanize support for the Pietitie. The social medium is used both to argue in favour of Zwarte Piet in its current form, as to criticize the tradition as it is now celebrated. There are several Facebook pages opposing Zwarte Piet, which, although not nearly as popular as the Pietitie, are important for the development of strategies in the anti-Piet camp. A rather diverting example is provided in the documentary Our Colonial Hangover (Bergman, 2014). One of the leaders of Zwarte Piet Niet, a platform for Zwarte Piet–criticism, mentions that they receive a lot of death threats through social media. Because of Facebook’s demand that its users use their full name, the personal details (often including jobs, family members and place of residence) of the aggressors are well known to the Zwarte Piet Niet–group. The group decided to offer those that threaten them a choice: either you change your profile picture to an image denouncing Zwarte Piet, or we inform your mother of the death threats you have been sending us. In the documentary, a protester gleefully shows a profile of a pro-Pete who changed his picture. In addition, the central Facebook pages keep those who subscribe to it (those who have ‘liked’ it) up to date regarding new developments on Zwarte Piet. The followers can respond and debate the developments and negotiate their individual and collective position. The various pages encourage such discussions: they will post a link, along with a question such as ‘So, what do we think of this?’

As a forum for audience research, Facebook is special, and its characteristic qualities need to be taken into account. Doing so also points to the way in which our understanding of media may develop. Currently, we still tend to understand media communication as a logic of senders and receivers. While clearly platform media are different from broadcast media, no completely satisfactory terms are as yet widely used to describe the new type of media interactions that take place. While such notions as produser and prosumer (Burns, 2007; Toffler, 1980) mark the fact that the media landscape has changed, they suggest a great deal of activity and control on the part of those ‘formerly known as the audience’ (Rosen, 2006) – more than often seems to be the case. Jenkins et al. (2013) offer interesting alternatives to ‘active audiencehood’. They suggest we think of everyday hybrid media practices that mix and mash broadcast and platform media content in terms of affordance, appraisal, curation and conversation. All of these will help get us away from sizing up individual people or groups of people. After all, the outspoken reactions to Pietitie as well as the likes are clearly ‘afforded’ by Facebook. As a meshed network of friends groups, it is a digital space that invites you to speak your mind and especially to express your feelings: you are among friends. Those spreading images and jokes, and even those who simply liked Pietitie or the anti-Piet pages, appraised available options, valued them and sent them on: an everyday act of curation rather than evidence of what psychologists would call attitudes or personality structures. Appraisal and curation come much closer to the language of passion and affect that is used and underline that the sentiments expressed, however hurtful, may also be fleeting. Grossberg (1992) likened our investment (as fans) in specific media texts to a portfolio that will change over time: enthusiasms wane, others replace earlier texts, both those loved and hated. This, in all likelihood, is also what will happen with the Piet controversy.

Digital media can offer the audience researcher a unique glimpse into such practices. It allows us a peek at the discourses employed by both sides. Given Facebook’s function as a platform for the pro-Piet faction to express its sorrow and outrage, as well as the great quantity of comments available, this case is especially well suited for a digital ethnography. It follows what Miller and Horst (2012: 3) call their ‘prospectus for digital anthropology’ in that it seeks to understand ‘particularity and difference’ in digital communication in order to better understand ‘the framed nature of analogue […] life as culture’ (p. 4). It is a holistic and culturally relativistic undertaking that accepts the ambiguity of the digital with regard to its ‘increasing openness and closure’. While on the one hand, Facebook discussions are easily visible, along with the full names and details of those that participate, outsiders are sometimes forcibly removed or do not find their way to the page to begin with. Last but not least, we understand the digital as part of material culture including the remarkable capacity of digital communication to (re)impose normativity (Miller and Horst, 2012: 4).

We study roughly a thousand comments on the Pietitie, after three key events, which include: (1) the comments of Verene Shepherd (chair of the UN committee that investigated Zwarte Piet) and subsequent founding of the Pietitie in 2013, (2) the judicial ruling in Amsterdam maintaining Zwarte Piet is a hurtful stereotype in July 2014 and finally (3) the start of the festivities (with again many protesters arrested) in November 2014. The choice of these events is underscored by an Economist article (Is Zwarte Piet racism?, 2013), noting the heightening of tensions around Zwarte Piet in the year leading up to the founding of the Pietitie: ‘For many, even if a year ago he was not a symbol of Dutch racism, he is now’. We aim to identify common narratives and forms of reasoning and analyse these in a framework that understands these utterances as passion, rather than reason or emotion per se. Concretely, we looked for recurring terms, phrases and themes. These included ‘innocence’, ‘children’s festivity’, ‘magic’, ‘tradition’, ‘whining’ and ‘go back to your own country’. Quotes containing these key words were then clustered under broad themes, resulting in five main narratives discussed below. In addition, we collected relevant articles from the Dutch national and international press. National coverage tended to be descriptive and event-based. International quality press reported on Zwarte Piet in line with their ‘signature’. ¹ All show themselves to be somewhat perplexed at the continuance of this Dutch tradition – sometimes noting the otherwise progressive and liberal image of the Netherlands.

This also integrates the current research project in the tradition of qualitative audience research in cultural and media studies. Rather than seek to generalize across populations, we want to understand underlying cultural patterns and logics. Such logics cannot be identified with individuals. Wetherell and Potter (1988) in their study of racist talk, point to the variability of discourse. They show how, in long interviews, speakers may offer very different types of repertoires to make themselves understood, varying indeed from outright racist to concerned and inequality-conscious (Wetherell and Potter, 1988: 172). While the Pietitie harbours posts that qualify as racist, we see little merit in defining the Pietitie as racist in its entirety: such a stance might close the door to further investigation. The same argument holds for those offering their views. Rather than characterize them as racist or not racist, we discuss the worldviews referenced in the comments. As we have studied hundreds of Facebook posts on a page liked by almost 2 million Dutch (out of a population of 16 million) we feel safe in assuming we are reconstructing a dominant way of thinking about Zwarte Piet.

Passion rather than emotion

While passion, especially in the context of popular culture research, may connote strong feelings, excitement and lust, this is not how philosophers have understood it. Passion according to Ahmed (2004) like passivity derives from the Latin passio, which means suffering. While passion presents itself as strong language and even stronger feelings, there is a sense that all those engaged feel driven by forces outside of themselves. Passion is what Spinoza called an ‘affect’. It should be understood as outward directed. While passion is derived from passio, it is not suffering itself but rather what may come out of that suffering (Ahmed, 2013: 2–3). While all parties in the Black Pete standoff refer to hurt and suffering, theirs is not a passive suffering but a passionate going to battle. This is passion as commitment and as denial – related to a deeply nostalgic sense of loss versus an equally deep sense of hurt and exclusion. Ahmed (2004) argues that we must not see passion as something we ‘have’ inside us, as a property of the body, but rather as different forces that shape and reshape individuals and communities. Those that share an affect (or mutually feel they do) become part of a collectivity. Affects, thus, are political forces to be reckoned with. Ahmed (2004) uses the example of White supremacist groups:

The ordinary white subject is a fantasy that comes into being through the mobilization of hate, as a passionate attachment tied closely to love. The emotion of hate works to animate the ordinary subject, to bring that fantasy to life, precisely by constituting the ordinary as in crisis, and the ordinary person as the real victim. (p. 114)

In assessing the significance of passion we might look at which identities are formed by this sense of suffering. How does affect delineate groups and distribute power? Put differently, ‘we need to consider how [affects] work, in concrete and particular ways, to mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective’ (Ahmed, 2004: 119).

Results of the analysis

Following Ahmed (2004), we analyse the affects of the pro-Pieten and which narratives and identities their affects create. Reading the three selected discussions on the Pietitie, several narratives stand out. Some phrases are repeated verbatim and many jokes are recycled in slightly different forms. Although there are dissenting opinions, on the whole the comments portray a consensus. A key phrase is children’s festivity (kinderfeest), invoked to defend a range of positions. Other responses focus on the alleged racism of Zwarte Piet (a misconception), the ungratefulness of the accusers (all implied to come from migrant backgrounds) and the importance of tradition. Many comments mention several of the key words and might fall in several categories.

Piet and passion

The narratives employed by the pro-Pieten deal with innocence and loss, real or anticipated. Despite being at least 2 million in number – and likely much more – the commenters say that they have been passed over time and again. The narrative is of a country that has given more than it can afford. Usually, what ‘we’ have given up is not specified (nor who this ‘we’ might be). When it is, it relates to the labour migration of Turkish and Moroccan people to the Netherlands in the 1960s, the reunification of families 20 years later and the subsequent presence of Islam. Despite our great effort to accommodate these people, it is believed, they continue to disrespect our norms and values. ⁴ Greater still than the sacrifices that have already been made are the envisioned sacrifices to come. As per the domino effect described above, it is feared that a modification of Zwarte Piet will result in a complete ban of Christmas, alcohol or pork. It is felt to be in line with a long history of the Dutch giving up their traditions in favour of those of others.

Anti-Piet stances follow the logic of what Laclau (2005) terms a chain of equivalence. Populism, according to Laclau, is not an ideology but a logic of articulation (p. 33). The social space is dichotomized in an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ and unrelated issues are linked by the notion that ‘the people’ are being treated unfairly. Zwarte Piet, in this sense, is just the tip of the iceberg: it comes to signify all that White, stereotypical Dutch have had to swallow (whether felt or actual). By virtue of being ignored in favour of the Zwarte Piet–debate, issues ranging from gas prices to street crime are related to Piet. The protesters against Zwarte Piet are seen to be morally at fault because they are more concerned with Zwarte Piet than the ‘real issues’ the unspecified ‘we’ have had to deal with. The commenters on the Pietitie page reference high taxes, substandard elderly and health care and ritual slaughter in Islam, all in reference to Zwarte Piet. While the opponents of Zwarte Piet ‘whine’, these people have to deal with real troubles. The innocent Dutch nation is being abused and disrespected. The ultimate signifier of this abuse of innocence is the (White) child that just wants to enjoy the Sinterklaas festivities. The possible hurt of the Black child, on the other hand, is not taken into account.

In line with Ahmed (2004), the passion in the case of Zwarte Piet is deeply tied to suffering. Zwarte Piet has come to stand for all ways in which ‘the Dutch’ suffer. Following Ahmed (2004), this sense of suffering is not an emotion that a body ‘possesses’. Rather, it is a political force that shapes and reshapes communities. The sense of shared suffering creates a ‘we’ that can be leveraged for a variety of causes. The passion of the pro-Pieten seems to stem from precisely this affect, the passion that springs from shared suffering. Crucially, any other groups are denied the ability to suffer. A populist dimension is present, too: we are the people, we should be an unmistakable force, yet we, the ordinary people, are denied time and again: ‘The ordinary or normative subject is reproduced as the injured party: the one “hurt” or even damaged by the “invasion” of others. The bodies of others are hence transformed into “the hated” through a discourse of pain’ (Ahmed, 2004: 114).

Denial

The Pietitie states early on that it opposes any racism and the comments rarely seem to imply a categorical hatred of people of colour. Rather, Black people who champion Zwarte Piet in its current form are applauded. This, however, does not mean there are no racist elements in the Pietitie posts. Solomos and Back’s (1994) suggestion to speak of racisms rather than racism is therefore a useful one here. While Black Pete is both a racist caricature and gives rise to all kinds of everyday racist remarks (Essed, 1991), this is a racism that insults in its denial to consider the merit of other people’s wish to be included.

Racism, discrimination based on ethnicity and/or skin tone, can, according to Solomos and Back (1994: 151) be coded as culture. The qualities of social groups can be fixed and naturalized in hidden racial narratives in the language of culture and nation (Solomos and Back, 1994). Those championing a particular racism can do so by claiming that ‘they are protecting their way of life and that the issue of colour […] is irrelevant’ (Solomos and Back, 1994: 156). Eventually this racism-as-culture, too, meshes with the powers of the state: protesters have been roughly arrested at peaceful protests in 2011 and 2014, in one case leading to a revocation of a protester’s right to continue working as a security guard (Beltman, 2015).

Such occurrences may be at odds with the right to free speech and equality before the law and with Pietitie’s own claim to be against any form of racism. Yet this injustice and suffering is not recognized by the Pietitie crowd, otherwise so keen to identify wrongdoings. The passion they celebrate among themselves is experienced as aggression when experienced by the critics of Zwarte Piet: a group of peaceful protesters who get to be described as ‘dangerous idiots’. Black people are accepted when they celebrate ‘Dutch values’, but they are not allowed to suffer, least of all at the hands of (supposedly) well-meaning Dutch. Because the suffering is not recognized, neither is the passion that it gives rise to. As a result, calm complaints are coded as whining, calls to action as aggressive and dangerous. (Or, in the case of children of colour being hurt indirectly due to Zwarte Piet and the continuing existence of stereotypes, the suffering is flat-out ignored. ⁵ ) Whining and being aggressive are widely accepted as moral flaws. By categorizing all complaints voiced by people of colour as either whiney or aggressive, so-called defenders of Dutch culture have given themselves a justification for opposing or silencing people of colour, without having to invoke their ethnicity. Rather, they can say, this is about defending their culture from immoral opponents. Herein lies the racism of the pro-Pieten: in disallowing Dutch people of colour to suffer, pro-Pieten are denying them an independent and full emotional life. That is to say, they deny the anti-Pieten their full humanity.

Denial has several meanings, and the Pietitie comments signify a denial of reality (and the reality of others) on many levels. The third definition of denial according to the Oxford dictionary is ‘Refusal to acknowledge an unacceptable truth or emotion or to admit it into consciousness, used as a defence mechanism’ (Denial [def 3], n.d.). The unacceptable truth of globalization is not allowed into consciousness here. This requires a refusal to admit to such historical realities as colonialism or the Dutch involvement in the slave trade (while slavery is sufficiently long ago to be irrelevant, Sinterklaas has been around forever). The Facebook likes and comments are appraisal, undertaken to curate content in which 2 million Dutch express a wish for a world of innocence. They have inspected the options, weighed the possibilities and have decided that this is a children’s festive event. While they, as grown-ups, may have fallen from paradise, there is no need for their children to do so as well. The claim that this is racism simply has no place in the idealized world of Sinterklaas (a complete stranger after all who brings gifts and often the very things you have asked for). As several comments claim, children know no racism. This is patently untrue but that cannot be the criterion when trying to understand everyday media interaction.

Related to the wish to salvage Sinterklaas as a domain of innocence, joy and togetherness are the angry complaints that say: ‘this is our tradition, keep your hands off!’. These comments and others also suggest a deep sense of loss: ‘We have given up so much’. It is as if 2 million Dutch just woke up to the fact of globalization. The Netherlands saw two political murders of anti-Islamic populist figures in the 2000s. Somehow a make-over of Zwarte Piet pushes home the fact of globalization more still than did the murder of Theo van Gogh. ‘We have become foreigners in our own country’ was the phrase used at the time (Buruma, 2006: 1, quoting a witness account in the NRC Handelsblad) and it is reused in the context of Zwarte Piet. Writing about the murder of Van Gogh, Buruma (2006) concludes his book with an account of a Dutch soccer victory over the Germans, that to him has all the hallmarks of a traditional feast: ‘I saw people in clogs, dancing to an old-fashioned brass band. Like all carnevals, this patriotic feast with shades of a Brueghel painting, was a fantasy, the celebration of an imagined community, rural, joyous, traditional, and white’ (p. 262). Sinterklaas, likewise, until recently offered a return to this ‘invented country’ (Buruma, 2006). According to Buruma (2006), such a patriotic fantasy contains the seeds of destruction. There is no such thing anymore as an unproblematically Dutch piece of the world. Others come there, feel they co-own the Netherlands, and suggest that ‘we’ accord to ‘their’ rules. The outrage over a make-over of Zwarte Piet is disenchantment and shared grief over a double idolization or reification (of childhood as paradise and the nation state as a sovereign entity that can be owned) that plays into this particular racism. The fantasy of an enclosed the Netherlands, dearly held by current Dutch anti-European populism, at the very least temporarily splinters in the conflict over Zwarte Piet.

By way of conclusion

This exercise in digital anthropology, the audience research for this new era, is predicated on the idea that there is no need to assume meaningfulness in all online utterances. These are not, in a literary sense, ‘authored’ texts. These are acts of everyday curation. Utterances may simply be a sign of allegiance, a confirmation of a friendship bond, or a reference to a shared memory. There is no pre-given political premium on productivity occurring in everyday life when studying media-related practices, nor is there a problem with mere consumption, with merely liking or not further circulating the texts one has appraised. This is not only a theoretical and methodological point of departure, it is also a political one.

In interpreting the Facebook behaviour with regard to Zwarte Piet as everyday curation, and more specifically as declaring allegiance, we can see the outlines of a community on the basis of a shared affect. The social space in Netherlands becomes divided into opposing factions. You are either for or against Zwarte Piet. The mere posing of the question whether and how Pieititie can be considered to be racist, is to take up a position in the debate and to declare one’s sympathies. The aggressive nationalist rhetoric that has come to accompany the defence of Zwarte Piet ‘as is’ allows no room for reflection. To question Zwarte Piet or suggest the merest recoding is read as denouncing Zwarte Piet and an accusation of those who want to defend what they want to define as tradition and as innocent children’s festivities. The ethnologist Helsloot, writing about Zwarte Piet, finds himself confessing to his sympathies for one of the camps. He is surprised to find himself stepping out of his usual more guarded and neutral academic role (Helsloot, 2009: 83–84, 2012: 14). Cultural studies as a field has always been more open to a reflexive mode of writing. Our sympathies, that will have been clear, are with the critics of Zwarte Piet.

Nonetheless, the theoretical framework of passion offers us the option to go beyond dichotomies of racist/not racist or good/bad. The Pietitie is more usefully understood as a discourse of pain, given consequence in the passion of the Pietitie commenters. At the same time, it is a highly problematic discourse. The sense of suffering it denotes excludes the possibility of the suffering of others. Following Ahmed, affect is less a personal possession (‘I have this feeling’) than a force to align the individual with the group (‘we suffer’). It is a demarcation into us and them sufficiently strong to deny others their full humanity. This is often a demarcation along ethnic lines. Zwarte Piet is the umpteenth issue that saw the ‘native Dutch’ – who, in the Pietitie narrative, have been nothing but good – losing power, influence and authenticity. This myth of innocence allows the commenters to disregard history, context and outside perspectives as corrupting influences on the magic of the festivities. A truly Dutch past – whatever that may mean – is imagined that has not been tainted by mass immigration, globalization or simply growing up. This fantasy of innocence likens the Dutch nation to an innocent (White child), fiercely to be protected. This is denial of the realities of a multicultural, globalized world.

Nor does holding on to Zwarte Piet in its current form resolve the other issues in the chain of equivalence, the various miseries befalling the Dutch nation: it will not lead to better care for the elderly or instant emancipation of Dutch Muslim women. Ironically, if the pro-Pieten could accept the possible hurt of Dutch people of colour, they could find new allies to address the social issues so crucial to them. In allowing others to feel the same emotions as oneself, new affective communities could be wrought. Of course, a warm friendship seems like an unrealistic possibility. Nonetheless, accepting that others, all others, are capable of feeling the full spectrum of emotions may allow the pro-Pieten and the Dutch nation as a whole to settle on a form of courteousness: a courtesy not based on the suppression or hiding of animosity, but upon the acceptance that others, too, are fully human and capable of hurt. Dutch intellectual, writer and mediamaker Anil Ramdas suggested in 1997 in a public lecture that anger and radicalization are difficult to wield as tools. They, moreover, may hardly benefit those on whose behalf they are used. Ramdas gave his lecture in a period of debate that led up to the conclusion that multiculturalism had failed, a period that initiated a sharp right-wing populist swing in politics. The resultant polarization in the Dutch political landscape and public debate is marked by the two political murders that were to follow: of the right-wing populist politician Fortuyn (in 2002) and filmmaker Van Gogh (in 2004). The Piet controversy echoes this long trajectory of the becoming ordinary of populism and its inherent denial of colonialism and globalization. It is as if the Dutch in this debate are waking up to a new and utterly changed world that they do not much like. Ramdas’s suggestion bears repeating as much for its balanced reasoning and for its marking of the extent to which the Zwarte Piet controversy and the holding on to the stereotypical traits given to this figure signify how empathy, respect and generally everyday courtesy have come to be in short supply. Let us end with Ramdas’ quote. Courtesy, argues Ramdas (1997),

is the first building block of civilization. It does not suffice on its own but it is a necessary start. I am prepared to make do with courtesy when sincere respect or sympathy proves impossible. V.S. Naipaul, the writer, recounts a story how he once entered a drinking establishment in the south in the United States where whites were singing racist songs about Negroes. It fell silent when he entered and remained silent for as long as he was there, the singing was continued the moment he left. In these parts, the author mused, courtesy might well be the best one can get and it may also be enough. Courtesy is more than an outward show, more than embellishment or superfluous ceremonial behavior. It is a means to prevent hurt, a ritual to exorcise hurt, a technique to prevent humiliation. (p. 10)